Finally, someone posted about the translation project. This, along with print, are two of the sorts of projects that make me proud to work at The Company. The system is really amazing -- probably the best in the world. Props to Franz and hawk, etc.

(But as someone pointed out in the comments, that slide is sorta unfortunate: the Arabic says "bin la", not bin laden...)

Franz Och and the Google team are crushing everybody on the BLEU metric right now.

it irritates the hell out of the community.

and all machine translations are so bad right now that arguing about the quality of BLEU is kinda irrelevant -- it's definitely in the "correlates well" part of the BLEU approximation to human judgements.